The garden centers are putting out their trays of blooming annuals, many of which will find their way into planters and containers of all sizes and shapes. They’ll be hung on porches, set out on decks and placed by doorways. It is hard to resist all that color and frilly form. Fortunately for us we don’t have to resist because those familiar annuals, impatiens, petunias, begonias and geraniums are inexpensive and put on a good and cheerful show…
The Bridge of Flowers is a blooming wonder. Starting in April and through October it is in flower from the bright crocus and daffodils of early spring, through rose season and then dahlia season. I could not possibly give you a list of all the flowers that take their turn on the Bridge, bulbs, annuals, perennials, blooming shrubs and trees, all making life in Shelburne Falls a delight and attracting over 35,000 visitors from across the country and…
It’s been quite a week. First, here in Massachusetts, we celebrated Patriot’s Day which commemorates “the shot heard around the world,” the battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. On television there was a program about John Muir, born in 1838, naturalist, conservationist, and moving spirit behind declaring Yosemite a national park, and a founder of the Sierra Club. Yesterday we celebrated the 41st Earth Day on which we could be reminded of any number of…
The technique of gardening without digging up the soil has been around for a long time. Ruth Stout had a best seller on her hands when her book “How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back” came out in 1955. Two more recent books that explain how to have a productive garden without breaking sod and breaking your back are “Lasagna Gardening” by Patricia Lanza and “Weedless Gardening” by Lee Reich who lives right here in…
“When you have such a huge list of native plants, [as we do in New England] you don’t need exotics,” Ruth Parnall said as she handed me pages of native grasses, wetland wildflowers, ornamental shrubs, vines and trees. Then she handed me a list of books that would give me even more names of natives. Her comment reminded me of the enormous traffic of our native plants to England in the 1700s. John Bartram, often considered the first…
Orra White Hitchcock was a college president’s wife, a mother of eight, and an artist. The art she created, drawings and watercolor paintings of flowers, grasses and other plants, were scientifically accurate yet transformed by a lyrical delicacy and artistry. An exhibit of her work, Orra White Hitchcock (1796–1863): An Amherst Woman of Art and Science, co-curated by Daria D'Arienzo and Robert L. Herbert, will run through May 29 at the Mead Museum of Art at Amherst College.…
Why do we garden? Each gardener will have her own list that might include loving flowers, wanting a beautiful yard, loving to eat sun warmed tomatoes, wanting to save money, liking the exercise, wanting to care for the environment, wanting specialty vegetables for gourmet cooking, wanting to save money on the food bill or just plain liking to play in the dirt. Michele Owens lays out her reasons in the title of her new book, Grow the Good…
“I want to shout out: do what you please, follow your own star; be original if you want to be and don’t if you don’t want to be. Just be natural and gay and light-hearted and pretty and simple and overflowing and general and baroque and bare and austere and stylized and wild and daring and conservative, and learn and learn and learn. Open your minds to every form of beauty.” Constance Spry Those passionate words came from…
Fourteen years ago, at the age of 17, Jere Gettle put together his first list of heirloom seeds and mailed it to 550 gardeners. Now he oversees a veritable empire consisting of the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, the Bakersville Pioneer Village complete with seed store, bakery, restaurant, jail, herbal apothecary, music barns with monthly festivals and more in Missouri, and the Petaluma Seed Bank in California, which opened last spring. Most recently he bought the Comstock, Ferre…
My maternal grandparents immigrated from Sweden when both were in their teens. They rarely talked about their life there but did mention that all they had to eat was potatoes. When he was 70 my grandfather planned his first trip back to visit to his sister, but returned early. He said his sister did not like to cook, so she fried up a batch of potato pancakes every Saturday and parceled them out over the course of the…